While all that was going on

A side project we had going with the same team doing our addition was to give our existing main floor rooms a facelift. Two small details on the main level had been ones on our to-do list for a while.

D has been bothered by the fact that a few rooms on the main floor of our house have crown molding, which he really likes, while others do not. We made sure we added it to the sunroom when we had that remodel done, and he wanted to add it to the rest of the rooms too. And now the work crew was already tasked with matching the baseboard, door and window trim for the addition--so why not throw some crown molding in, too.

And I have forever wanted the doors in our house to match. Most of the first floor doors were plain doors, while the upstairs doors (and, randomly, the two closets in the guest room) had panels in them. The plain doors were beat-up and generally unattractive, and I'd occasionally try to find a handyman (what is the gender-neutral term for this? handy person does NOT sound right. maybe just a general contractor?) to install some, after doing some research to learn that door installation was no easy feat and not something we wanted to tackle ourselves. So while they were ordering custom doors for the addition (pocket doors, in that case), we added this to the pile.

You can guess this added up to a very expensive and very expansive side quest.

The molding:

A few "before" and "after" pictures in the two rooms we decided to trim: the office and the guest room:

The crown molding was wide enough to interfere with our existing air vent (which, as a reminder, had been above a window but is now above the entry into the new addition) so they sort of carved out a little niche for it. I...don't love it. But I didn't have any better ideas and we certainly weren't about to cut the ceiling and move the vent an inch just for this. And honestly, I really never look up and see it.

Taking a closer look at the line where the ceiling meets the wall also made me hyper-aware that we didn't always do a great job with painting the edge. Yet another thing that crown molding solves (well at least if that crown molding is pre-painted).

Take a moment to admire all those corners!

More corners, no molding:

With molding!

To give you an idea of how very disruptive this felt, here's a "during" picture. You can see the lovely molding going up but also how all the furniture is in the middle of the floor covered in a tarp (at one point, I needed to get something in one of the dresser drawers, so that was fun).

In the end, we're very happy with the look. It makes the house feel more consistent across rooms. Much like with the doors, which now also all match. Onwards!

The new doors arrived, all custom ordered. And of course since we have an old house, each door had its own unique fit issues they had to deal with on-site. In total, we swapped out 6 doors (three doors off the hallway for the bathroom, guest bedroom, and office; the pantry closet; the bathroom closet; and the office closet). 

We got new doorknobs too, since the old ones weren't worth salvaging. Many had paint all over them and they felt light and cheap. We went with Schlage knobs, and the bedroom and bathroom ones have a lock on them. We have a few more to install, actually, in the doors that we did not replace. But that's a post for a different time.

Here's the teeny pantry door that is so narrow, it only became a three-panel door.

And here it is now! It's a heavier door (we didn't get fully solid doors, but we were upsold on a slightly heftier model from our original choice and we couldn't be happier--they're the perfect weight).

Here's the "before" view of our bathroom and office doors. You can see that they're not bad, but they are very plain. These doors were wood, so that was nice, but they were hollow and light and pretty beat-up. I felt that swapping them out was no huge loss to our home.

And here it is now. I think the panels look a lot better.

This picture above does depict how we did not quite get the right white. The white is Chantilly Lace, described as a "go-to" white, a decision supported by many blogs we had read in advance when trying to pick the best white for our addition trim (in semi-gloss) and hallway (no record of which finish we decided on and they didn't leave us extra, ugh). We were wary of "warm" white (whites with yellow undertones) since our home is all grays and blues. But yes, this white turned out to be quite white. TOO white. And yes, our new addition hallway is VERY bright. It showed us that most of the things we thought were white were actually white with yellow undertones. Oops. This is noticeable next to our IKEA liquor cabinets in the kitchen and in our main floor bathroom too. It's also doing our dingy towels no favors.

Nonetheless, we are happy with the result. The doors feel solid and look much better. The trim classes the house up a bit more. They had both been on our to-do list for a long time and we had just lacked the ability to find someone to do the upgrade. (Once we even came close, with a handshake deal that fell through.) So it feels good to have this done.

Lawn and Murder Bees

Last summer, we (well, mostly I), continued to tend our vegetable garden. After protecting the garden with chickenwire and closing it off like Fort Knox to keep the rabbits out after they decimated my snap peas in 2021, we did manage to keep out most of the yard herbivores and harvest some things. Here, for example, is one of our tomato harvests. (I have many more harvest pictures from 2022 but this post isn't really about that, so imagine radishes and cucumbers too.)

The fact was, however, I didn't really enjoy gardening (at least not after it got about 75 and the mosquitos came out) and the kids did not want to help and, well, it was much easier just to buy those veggies from the store. Things had become a little wild by the end of the summer as I went out less and less to avoid being assaulted by biting insects:

So last fall, we made the rewarding decision to give up on veggie gardening and turn it back into yard:

This summer, it was a lovely patch of grass (and not even the weed-filled grass of the rest of the yard, yet). Though we tried to level it as best we could, it is still a little mounded, but hopefully as the tilled ground compacts, it will mostly be level with the rest of the yard. And really it probably is only noticeable to us.

All was well. We spent our limited gardening time in our flower beds along the front of the house and the back fence line, slowly trying to build out our pollinator-friendly spaces.

Until...the yellow jackets came...D noticed some activity in the lawn while watering the back garden a few weeks ago. He had mildly angered...some buzzing things...and went over to investigate. About 10 feet away from the activity, he got  a stinger to the neck and turned tail and headed indoors. After asking some neighbors and doing some research, he learned that they were most definitely not ground bees, which are solitary (and usually stingless, which these assuredly were not), but likely a yellow jacket nest. Yellow jackets are aggressive and really not something you want to mess with. And while they can excavate their own hole, they will often find space where the ground is looser or even dug out by something like a groundhog. Like the soft earth of our former veggie garden! UGH.

They had moved in right at the edge of that new patch of grass. Here are a few pictures of their nest location, from a safe distance away (including inside through a screened window--I was taking no chances):

The holes can be incredibly small and they can possibly have multiple entrances, but the primary suggestions for how to eradicate them included pesticides and suffocation. D figured out that they were dormant/sleeping at night and that it was possible to attempt to cover up the hole until pest professionals could come and take care of it. He covered up the (main? only?) entrance with a bucket and a brick. Here is a zoomed in video, taken from afar, of the angry yellow jackets the next morning:

That was a lot of NOPE right there. A couple of weeks after D made the painful discovery, professional help arrived. Wearing a bee-keeper hat and thick clothes, he widened the hole that served as the entrance put chemicals in.

He warned us to be on the lookout for holes created by other animals that can serve as a starting point for yellow jackets, and to fill them in and stomp on them. Two days later, we've seen no activity from that nest, thank goodness. 

Edited, one hour after originally posting, to add:

We found another. Fuuuuuuuuddddggggge. Since it's in the median, we're checking to see if it's our municipality's problem or ours. (Further edited to add - the town will take care of it, yay!)

Mouse trap

It seems appropriate as my little fur baby turns 21 today (yes! 21!) to write about the pests I hinted at in my last two posts. We have had mice problems periodically for a long time in this house. It's an older home with a yard, trees, etc. and, try as we might to seal it up, they always find a way in. But it hasn't typically been a problem because:

2012 picture of my mouser

The only time a mouse made it into our house for real (as opposed to our old breezeway which wasn't even sort of sealed off from the outside) was the harrowing 29 days when this little guy went missing in late 2015.

But our little fur baby has put in his time, and his mousing is not quite up to snuff these days, as he's mostly (if not totally) deaf and a little slow and creaky (but still amazingly fit and healthy for his age). And so back in August, grandma was housesitting for us and sent me a note to say she'd seen a mouse run into the living room (this while she was sitting next to her small, perfectly capable dog, but oh well). It wasn't that we didn't believe her, but we were a little skeptical. We had seen no signs of a mouse eating our food, though we did leave cat food out all night and we had recently noticed an uptick in our cat's appetite...The bowl was now empty many mornings. Hm...

When we got back, and always in the pursuit of hard data, we put up a camera near the cat bowl to see what we could. Many days passed with only the only motion detected being that of our cat. We wondered if grandma had been seeing things. And then:

There were even some videos of a mouse eating some cat food and then scurrying away for a few moments while the cat came in to eat and then coming back to eat more. So I guess our little mouser isn't quite up to the task anymore.

Our first step was to move the cat bowl around and try our best to figure out where the mice were coming in from, but after a couple weeks of this (moving the bowl to the sun room, living room, etc. all while adjusting the camera), we were no closer to figuring out their source.

It was time to start catching them, even if we couldn't figure out how they were getting in. We put out our humane traps, which actually did catch a mouse pretty quickly. 

It also proved to us that he had friends. Another mouse entered video to figure out where his buddy was and how to get him out. Great....

We also realized that they were scurrying out from under the stove/oven and, sure enough, when we moved it out from the wall, we saw a LOT of poo. I had a picture for that but decided it was probably best for you to use your imagination. You're welcome.

We freed that mouse far from our home and then tried again. This time, they were too smart. We never caught anyone else. It was time to call in some professional help and--distressingly--some professional traps. So for a while, we have had to live with a bunch of snap traps, covered at least by a box so no one would accidentally snap them on a finger or toe. Or see something gross when we came down for breakfast in the morning.

And sure enough, these caught some of our visitors. Four in all, so far. Two the very first night that the kill traps went out, then a big one a while later that was maybe living in our walls for a while with all the hoarded food (since we didn't catch him on camera in the interim), then one in the basement.

Our professional pest control expert had one suspicion of how these mice are getting in after looking around the house both inside and out. After all, we've done a lot of work over the years to seal the house up (for energy efficiency as much as for pest control). It turned out that when we had our siding replaced this spring, they did not properly seal the hole where our AC piping goes into the house.

The timing checks out. And we've sealed it up now. So far, so good. But we still have the traps out and set up the camera most nights, after finding basement mouse only 3 weeks ago. We're not quite sure how to know we're done. But however long it takes, our little birthday boy definitely has earned his retirement skritches and getting to keep his food out for whenever he wants to eat.

How many people does it take to...deliver a shed?

One. The answer is an amazing "one." Seriously. Just watch.

First, here's the big reveal on D's amazing job clearing the pad and laying down pavers. You can see it's not quite done, but the rest can be completed any time because it's not under the shed and just there as decoration and to make the whole pad look even.

 Here it is, the big day! Can you guess which one is ours?

We chose a dark gray with no special dormer on top--or, if you're thinking logically, the one on the edge that can be unloaded. See that guy there? He was the only person on this delivery. We waited, expecting to see a small team emerge from the pick-up truck. But nope.

One person and a remote-controlled "mule" is apparently all it takes. It was pretty magical to watch. He started by picking up the side with the mule, fork-lift style, and bringing it off the flatbed slowly. The flatbed started rising so that it created an incline. Then he added wheels to the other side of the shed and eased it off the flatbed completely.

 After that, it was just like a video game, watching him maneuver the shed around various obstacles.

Here it is, going through the empty lot. I guess sometimes it's good that it's no longer full of beautiful old trees, sort of.

Then it was a tight fit between our Japanese snowbell and our patio. We had to move a pot of mint to make room as it made its descent from the patio. This thing really seemed to be able to turn on a dime.

 Here it is making the turn to the concrete pad.

Parallel parking this beast is apparently easier than parking a car. Despite us leaving almost NO extra clearance next to the log pile and sand box, he put it exactly in the right position between the crack in the concrete and the other edge. The poor guy was smooshed up against the sandbox when he removed the tires. Oops.

And here it is, in all its glory. Since it arrived earlier this week, we've been busy loading it up. Stay tuned for the tour inside our shed next time.

Edited to add this beautiful artistic rendering:

Spoiler alert--it holds everything perfectly and our garage is starting to look amazing as we clear out yard stuff and sweep out the dirt. Spoiler alert part two--we realized we forgot to take "before" pictures either inside the empty shed or inside our disastrous garage. Trust me, the garage looked awful.

Asbestos Free

Today the air quality tests confirmed that our basement is now asbestos free. Three weeks and quite a bit more money later, a problem we never knew we had has now been fixed.

When the plumber identified the insulation that he believed was asbestos, we immediately called in a team to test it. The company took it off to the lab and said that it was 10-20% chrysotile asbestos. Apparently this stuff comes in different varieties. We had another company come out to do the abatement and they identified yet ANOTHER pipe covered in asbestos insulation, this time unwrapped (the first pipe had something like packing tape covering the insulation). Yippee. Fortunately it was in a corner of the basement that we rarely use, leading into the unfinished bathroom that I usually forget we have. Can you see it there, running parallel with the back wall and above the orange spray foam (seriously, even our energy efficiency company working right next to it didn't noticed?).

 Here is a picture of it from inside the unfinished bathroom:

So the day of the abatement, a team of three worked for about two hours. They shut themselves up in the unfinished part of the basement, ran this loud vacuum device, and did their thing. For obvious reasons, we left them alone.

Then a couple of days later after the dust had settled, they came back and ran a little fan for an hour that circulated air onto some sticky pads - apparently a more sophisticated and sensitive test than the industry default of using sticky tape to just pick up surface lint, or so they said (either way, it was included in the price - which was their minimum price anyway). So off it went to the lab and, as of today, we are officially clear:

Asbestos-free party anyone? I wonder if they sell theme decorations for that? I'm thinking Hazmat suit.

The Suspense is Killing Me (I hope not literally)

This isn't the post I planned to write next. I have some exciting kitchen ideas and some beautiful flowers that were all just waiting to be posted. But suddenly, a heating pipe in our basement started leaking. Not onto our heads, because it is wrapped with insulation, but leaking for sure. We could see some wet rusty stuff forming. Super slow, maybe a pinhole leak, and we're not using our heating right now. Not a big deal. D called our heating guy, who was out of town for a few days but promised he would come take a look.

He stopped by today. Here is the leaky pipe, from two angles. Can you guess the potential problem?

Asbestos.

Ughhhhhhhhh.

A mitigation company came and took a sample for testing. What was going to be a minor and cheap repair may turn into something much bigger and more annoying. Stay tuned - we should know for sure tomorrow.